Anger--"With a Difference."

—“No, I do not object to being made very angry occasionally. Downright anger brings with it a certain moral revivification, is a sort of electric storm. I feel more alive for some time after.”

“ I wonder to hear you say so. Anger has quite the opposite effect upon me. It is sœva indignatio, and it lacerates the heart. The sensibilities are flayed alive. In my experience, anger is a true passion, a suffering. Carried to its extreme, it reacts in moral exhaustion and syncope. I can never understand what people mean when they warn you that they are ‘ dangerous’ if their anger is aroused. I am never less so. When I am angry, my hand trembles, my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth ; I can do nothing, say nothing.”

“ Nevertheless, I should be half afraid of your kind of auger. The afterpiece is apt to be tragic. You are angry to have been made angry.”

“But my anger never does any harm abroad. I suffer it, — no one else.”

“There speaks a Spartan soul. You let the vicious little fox prey upon your own vitals, before you will discover to any one the fact that the unworthy passion of anger has overtaken you. It is a matter of pride, perhaps, as much as of benevolence that forbids one’s wreaking wrath outwardly.”

“ It is not one poor little fox, but a menagerie of wild beasts that I have to deal with, when I am thrown into the arena with Anger. You see I do not find in this passion the energizing agent you describe. I would be slow to receive anger, and would part with it as quickly as possible. I cannot afford to be angry.”

“ If you are slow to anger, you are sure to keep it long. I have — or rather, I did have — an Indian - dispositioned friend. Ugh ! how I dreaded his still rages ! Metaphors of heat are not suitable to express what they were like. Think of the last day in December, towards evening and just before the final setting-in of winter : the bare ground freezes white ; the very footpaths in their windings look rigid ; the great limbs of the trees cleave with the intense but silent cold as night comes on. His anger was like that, — an all-winter campaign. After the breaking-up and final thaw, — if they ever came, — nothing was the same as before. His anger was slow to gather, but, once it began, it never ceased acquiring until it became a formidable and insoluble concretion. I grew impatient with him. I used often to say, ‘Oh, be angry and done with it ! ’ Instead of igniting promptly, as I should have done, when sufficient provocation was given, he would always wait to see whether there was more to come ; or he would hold off, on the chance of having been mistaken, or from some chimerical notion of giving the offender an opportunity to retract the offense. It was only when thoroughly convinced that the case was one for ‘ righteous indignation ’ that he would let his Erinnyes loose.”

“ I don’t see why he was not in the right. There certainly should be a justification of anger, if one indulges in it at all.”

“ Oh, but anger should be a generous, spontaneous passion, according to my way of thinking. It should n’t wait to ‘ get a good ready.’ By the time this individual concluded to receive the leaven of wrath, the other, or others, concerned in the matter had passed on to a different standpoint. The occasion was outlawed. The cause was cold.”

“Oh! . . . Was this ‘ Indian - dispositioned friend ’ of a constant nature ? ”

“His great virtue was constancy, — so all admitted.”

“ I should have hated to give such an one cause for auger.”

“ You would have hated to be the object of that anger. I do assure you, it was most uncomfortable.”

“ Apropos of what we have been saying, may I read some verses I picked up the other day ? They might have been written by your Indian-dispositioned friend, in a fit of revulsion against the temperament which you deplore.

TO ANGER.

Could the writer have been your whilom friend ? ”

“ Something very like this I have heard him say. [Silently.] How long he harbors his grievance, and I hold him no grudge, I ’m sure ! ”